TAMPA, Fla. — There's a growing population of Hispanic students in Tampa Bay schools, many of them migrant children fleeing turmoil in their home countries.
“Tell me about the characters first; who did you see?” Ms. Ashanti Foresyth asked her class at Wharton High School in Tampa.
Watching a short film and pointing out the characters may seem like a basic lesson on the narrative process, but it’s much more in her class.
“Today, there was only one person who didn’t speak Spanish in the class, and she was from the Philippines,” Foresyth explained.
At Wharton High, 9% of the students are English learners, and 71% of those are Spanish speakers.
“They'll come to me, and they'll start speaking in Spanish, and I'm like, ‘Oh, I understood this word or that word,’ you know, and then we'll laugh at each other and (say), ‘Oh, no, it's this way, not that way.’ And it just makes for a more comforting learning environment, and they'll try more, they'll put more effort in,” Foresyth said.
She teaches English 1 as well as “ESOL” which stands for “English for Speakers of Other Languages.”
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Her ESOL classes are just a few of the hundreds throughout Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), where nearly 23,000 of the district's 224,000 students are learning English.
“One of the things that we have to pay attention to, unfortunately, is like wherever there is strife in other countries because that typically means we're going to see more students,” the district's Executive Director of English Language Learners and Migrant Program Elena Garcia said.
In the last three years, the district has added 9,000 migrant students, a large influx this year, fleeing civil unrest in Cuba.
“Over the last five years, we would have an average of about 150 each year of Cuban students enrolling, and since the beginning of the school year till now, we've had about 600,” Garcia said.
The number of unaccompanied children who are coming to the U.S. is only growing.
In November 2021, the humanitarian nonprofit Church World Services launched a program to specifically aid unaccompanied minors, now with three caseworkers based in Tampa to help children with resources like school.
“They’re escaping violent situations. They are dealing with a lot of challenges and traumatic experiences. So getting used to going through the adjustment process, getting used to the new surroundings. Going into the school, a lot of them have lack of prior formal education,” regional manager of the Immigration and Refugee Program for Church World Services Rosario Noa explained.
Noa adds that one of their biggest challenges every day is resources to help the children who can’t read or write, let alone understand the language.
HCPS said that they follow trends of enrollment and prioritize resources at schools specific to the population.
In addition to ESOL classes and bilingual paraprofessionals or aids, every teacher has basic ELL training.
“It's important that they learn the language and the content simultaneously because we want them to be able to achieve the American dream, just like any other student,” Garcia said.
This year, the district also added 80 immigrant students from Afghanistan, and they expect an influx from Ukraine soon.
Another challenge for the school district is making sure students have help when there are significant staffing shortages.
“The ESOL resource teacher and the ESL teacher and the bilingual paraprofessionals, they are a team that we are just so grateful for because our students need them the most,” HCPS ELL coordinator Kathryn Raike said. “We definitely appreciate them, and we need more.”
Foresyth doesn’t speak fluent Spanish but said it actually helps the kids to see her try.
“It helps them see ‘somebody cares about me,’” she said. “They're gonna go that extra mile to really connect with me and not just, you know, shove papers in my face.”
Pinellas County Schools told us that since January 2021, they’ve identified 1,689 Spanish-speaking English Learners (EL), estimating about 750 entered from another country or state.
The Church World Services organization also told us that there are a few barriers to getting unaccompanied minors into local schools.
In Florida, children do not have to attend school after the age of 16, so many won’t accept those with pending immigration status to enroll at 16 to 17 years old.
“Sometimes we deal with kids who are 17, they want to go to school. They take them to school to be registered, but they're told that because they're 17 that it doesn't make sense for them to go to regular school, and they're sent to adult education,” Noa explained.
She also mentioned the need for free tutoring services as well as transportation.
